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Why?

I strongly believe that organisations can generate great value by maintaining their digital freedom.

Successful organisations own their digital experiences (quite literally) and put their employees and end users at the centre to delight and engage them.

Digital freedom is the best way to ensure you own the digital relationships with your users.

Open-source Drupal is the best platform to see to this digital freedom and independence.

How did I find out? My story.

I was part of the first generation that was professionally active in developing the first meaningful digital experiences - strictly websites, at the time - and I witnessed their growing potential first-hand. In 2007, I started out as a Drupal developer. This experience made me gain a deeper understanding of the technical and functional aspects behind digital experiences and how they could help organisations to create better relationships with their stakeholders. I understood how this ability to connect through a digital experience was generating customer satisfaction and how it increased customer lifetime value or CLV. I also realised that creating relationships with users through a digital platform was incredibly scalable. This made me think about the opportunity that laid in creating value for organisations of all kinds.

My time as a developer was very valuable to me, because it taught me what an incredible amount of value organisations can actually gain when they are presented with the freedom and ownership to build and evolve their own digital platforms. Time and time again I noticed that the most valuable projects from both an agency, developer and client perspective were the ones where the client would be provided with the freedom to participate and be involved throughout every step of the decision-making and development process. The best results were produced by engaging the customer throughout the entire project, for example by giving clients access to tools and code, by training the customer and working as one integrated team. This way of working is miles away from either the full-service agency or the proprietary tech models. In the latter two cases, the goal is to take as much as possible out of the hands of the customer. While this model certainly can provide a lot of value in certain cases, it does not work for everyone. The main reasons organisations took control over their digital experiences are as follows:

They can eliminate overhead that is inevitably created by the full-service digital agency model.

Web teams and marketing departments can go to market a lot faster if they are not being constrained by proprietary tech and full-service management overhead.

Organisations can empower employees, build new digital know-how, increase collaboration and leverage their in-house business knowledge.

This, in turn, made me realise that:

Organisations would increasingly start to take control of their own digital experiences. Personal connections with users and delighting them in a way that is scalable has become an extremely important part of every company’s core business.

The best partners think long-term for their customers and allow them to learn as much as possible and save costs. They also give them the freedom to participate.

If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

The best digital experiences put the end user at the centre of attention and empowers organisations’ employees by giving them the best tools to connect with their users. This is exactly how smart companies create customer delight.

Because my belief in this model was so strong, I decided to found Dropsolid, together with Steven Pepermans. In fact, the literal meaning of our company name is Solid Drupal. We put all our money together, borrowed some more from friends and family, and established our company based on this one key idea that organisations would want to take control over their digital experiences and that Drupal would be the platform to do so. We went all out.

The company we looked up to from the beginning was Acquia, which had been started by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert in 2007. Acquia helps the most ambitious brands in the world to build their digital experiences. They bring digital freedom to some of the largest organisations in the world, and they do so using Drupal and their cloud platform. They serve customers like Pfizer, J&J and the US government.

Back in Belgium, we were dreaming of bringing the same value to our local market with Dropsolid. The European market is quite different from the American one. Europe has far more medium-sized enterprises, with turnovers ranging from €10M turnover to €1B. They need similar services and products to their larger counterparts, but often lack the required budgets and web teams that those multinational companies have at their disposal. So why not build a company that can deliver the required value to that particular market? Our goal was ambitious: to become the leading specialist in providing advice, services and a platform to our European mid-sized enterprises so they too could build open digital experiences that delight users and increase their customer lifetime values.

What followed was a true odyssey of building Dropsolid. I wrote down the entire process in a few lengthy blog posts, where you can find our journey in all its detail:

Part 1covers our the startup days, a time when we learned about running a business, funding, hiring & training talent, sales and marketing.

Part 2 talks about the scale-up stage. This is when we improved our overall product development, growth, vision, mission, values, corporate structure, procedures and business units.

Part 3 picks up with the hiring of our CTO Nick Veenhof, who built the Dropsolid cloud platform with our team. It also talks about how we shifted towards profitability in 2018. This was the period when we laid out the foundation of the European Digital Experience Company that guides mid-sized enterprises to their digital freedom.

Dropsolid is now the European specialist in Drupal & open digital experiences, with 65 experts on the team. We are running at a profit and are growing 30% per year. We give mid-sized organisations (and their agencies) strategic business advice on how to build their digital presence using Drupal. Our cloud platform currently powers more than 1500 Drupal environments.

We open-sourced our Drupal installer and we are a Diamond sponsor of DrupalCon, the largest Drupal event in Europe.

Within Dropsolid, I currently have the role of CEO. This implies responsibility for our vision, mission, values, commercial development, finances and company roadmap. I believe that taking control of digital experiences by adopting open-source Drupal allows organisations to secure their digital freedom. I believe it leads to scalable and sustainable engagement from both users and employees to deliver the vision of the organisation to its stakeholders.

If you are looking to hire me as an expert or as a speaker, you can do so on the following topics: Drupal, open source, starting up companies, creating an innovative culture, scaling up companies, SaaS/PaaS, digital experiences, digital business, financing,...

Want to know more about Dropsolid?

Dropsolid is the Digital Experience Company in Europe and guides organisations through their digital journey towards their best digital experience. We offer our customers our very own Dropsolid cloud platform, which allows organisations to get the most out of Drupal and open-source marketing technology. This Platform-as-a-Service and related professional services make sure organisations have the freedom to build a digital experience that delights users and results in tremendous customer lifetime value. Using the Dropsolid platform, businesses can roll out Drupal websites themselves, personalise the customer experience and improve the relationships with their customers.

What makes Dropsolid unique?

Dropsolid offers the total package of services around Drupal for building & operating open digital experiences: business strategy, UX, audit, consulting, agile development, marketing tech integration, training, maintenance, support & hosting to successfully launch open digital experiences. With Dropsolid & Drupal, organisations save 100% on their licence fees. Organisations go to market 50% faster using our Drupal expertise and the Dropsolid platform. Dropsolid is the guide for mid-sized enterprises & SMBs whose digital experiences form part of their core business.